Handful
The night before we were to take our leave, me and Sky scurried in the
dark, collecting everything together. We stole out to the stable to get
mauma’s quilt from the horse blankets, trekking cross the work yard with
the stars pouring down. We climbed up to Sarah’s room from the cellar to
the second floor, three trips, carrying quilts, black dresses, hats, veils,
gloves, and hankies. Up and down, me and my lame foot, passing right by
missus’ and little missus’ doors. We went in stocking feet, taking soft steps
like the floor might sink.
On the last trip, Sarah locked the door behind us, and I had a tarnish
memory of her screening the keyhole while she taught me to read, how we
whispered by the lamplight like we were doing now. I hung our dresses in
her wardrobe. They fit us tailor-made. The veils were pressed perfect, and
I’d sprinkled the velvet and crepe with missus’ lavender water so they had a
white lady scent. I’d sewed pockets on the inside of the dresses to hold our
money, along with Sarah’s booklet, mauma’s red scarf, and the address in
Philadelphia where we hoped to end up.
Sky said the rabbit was outfoxing the fox.
Sarah opened her steamer trunk and I rested mauma’s story quilt on the
satin lining at the bottom. I’d brought the quilt with red squares and black
triangles, hoping to pack it, too—the first blackbird wings I ever sewed—
but now that I saw how little the trunk was, I felt bad for taking up the
precious space. I said, “I can leave this behind.”
Sarah took it from me and laid it in the trunk. “I would rather leave my
dresses—they’re not worth much.”
I knew the perils of what she was doing same as she did. I read the
papers. Twenty years in prison for circulating publications of a seditious
nature. Twenty years for assisting a slave to escape.
I watched her fold her few belongings on top of the quilts and thought,
This ain’t the same Sarah who left here. She had a firm look in her eye and
her voice didn’t dither and hesitate like it used to. She’d been boiled down
to a good, strong broth.
Her hair was loose, dangling along the sides of her neck like silk vines,
like the red threads I used to tie round the spirit tree, and I saw it then, the
strange thing between us. Not love, is it? What is it? It was always there, a
roundness in my chest, a pin cushion. It pricked and fastened. Those girls
on the roof with the tea gone cold in the cup.
She brought the lid down on the trunk.
I told Sky, go on down to the cellar and rest and I’ll be there in a while
—I had one task left to do by myself. Then I eased down the stairs, out the
back door, and loped off with my cane to the spirit tree.
Under the branches, the moonlight splatted on me from the leaves. I felt
the owls blink and the wind draw a breath. When I looked back at the
house, there was mauma in the upstairs window looking down, waiting to
throw me a taffy. She was standing out in the ruts of the carriageway with
her leg hitched up behind her and the strap round her neck. She sat quiet
against the tree trunk with sewing in her lap.
I bent down and gathered up a handful of clippings from the tree—
acorns, twigs, a tired, dog-eared leaf—and stuffed them inside my neck
pouch. Then I took my spirit.
Next morning, we acted same as always. Sky went to the vegetable garden
with the picking basket and plucked the ripe tomatoes and lettuce tops.
Missus had me rubbing her ivory fans with sandpaper to scrub off the
yellow tint. I worked in the alcove with the scrape of the paper, eyeing the
steamship. The water on the harbor was ruffling like dress flounces.
Sarah was down the hallway in the withdrawing room with missus
having her last goodbye. She wouldn’t see her mauma again. She knew that,
and missus knew that. The air in the house sounded like a long note on the
harpsichord. Downstairs, Sarah’s trunk was locked and ready by the front
door, everything inside—mauma’s story, the flock of blackbirds.
The chiming clock sang out, and I counted the notes, nine of them, and
Sarah came out of the withdrawing room with her eyes stinging bright. I set
down the ivory fans and followed her to her room, leaving the rabbit cane
behind, leaning against the window.
Sarah was wearing a pale gray dress with a big silver button at the
collar, that same button from when she was a girl, pinning all her hopes on
it. Stepping out through the jib door to the piazza, she peered over the rail at
Sky in the ornament garden and gave her a wave. That meant, Leave your
plants and flowers and come inside. Pass by the house slaves. If little
missus stops you, say, Sarah summoned me.
When Sky tapped on the door, I was already in my dress, my face patted
with white flour gum. She smiled. She said, “You look like a haint.”
“Was anyone about?” Sarah asked.
“Nobody but Hector. He say to tell you Goodis gon bring the carriage
now.”
I did up the back of Sky’s dress and helped her paint her face, and
nobody spoke a word. Sarah’s brow was furrowed tight. She walked to and
fro cross the room, a drawstring purse swinging on her arm.
We tugged on our gloves. We fixed on our hats. We drew the veils down
to our waists. The tiny bottles of oleander juice, we tucked inside our
sleeves—Sarah didn’t need to know about that.
From behind the veil, the room looked faint like the haze before
daybreak.
I heard the horse clop along the side of the house, coming from the
work yard, and my stomach tipped. I’d tried not to set my heart too high,
tried not to think about the free black women up north wanting to take us in,
the attic in their house with the chimney running through it, but I couldn’t
hold back anymore. We could help them with their school and with making
their hats. I could sew quilts to sell. Sky could make a garden.
Sarah handed me her mauma’s gold-tip cane. Then she looked us over
and said, “I wouldn’t know you on the street.”
We went swift down the staircase. If little missus happened by, then she
happened by. Keep going was all. Don’t stop for nobody. Reaching the
bottom rung, I saw the empty place where the steamer trunk sat earlier, and
then Hector by the door, boring two holes in us with his eyes.
Sarah spoke to him. “Mother asked me to provide her visitors with a
ride to their home. You may go. Goodis will assist us from here.”
Hector eased off down the passageway. That way he looked at us—did
he know? Little missus was nowhere to be seen.
We stepped through the front door and the world rushed up. I looked
back at Sky and saw a trace of whiteness float behind her veil.
When Goodis drew the carriage up to the Steamboat Company sign, the
heat had gathered thick under our veils. Sweat rivered down our necks. Sky
lifted the gullies of her skirt for some air and the smell of lavender and body
stench drifted out.
Helping me from the carriage, Goodis whispered, “Lord, Handful, what
you doing?”
We hadn’t fooled him, and for what I knew, Hector might’ve figured it
out, too. I peered back to see if he was charging down East Bay in the Sulky
with little missus.
I said, “Goodis, I’m sorry, but we’re leaving. Don’t give us away.”
He pressed his lips together and I felt the places on me they’d touched.
He was the best man I knew. Without meaning for it, my heart had got
tangled with his.
He squeezed my hand, his face dim through the dark curtain. He said,
“You take care yourself, girl.”
We waited for the tickets, waited to board the ship, waited for somebody
to say, Who’re you?
When we walked cross the gangplank, the breeze lifted and the boat
rocked. I thought about missus and her devotions. We’d been through the
Bible and back with that woman. Now we were Jesus walking on water.
We climbed past the trunks, barrels, bales, and crates, past the boiler to
the second deck, and sat down on a bench in the salon to wait for the Guard
to pass through. The room was painted white with tables alongside the
windows, all of them nailed to the floor. People stood in twos and threes, in
their best clothes, in clouds of pipe smoke, and now and then they glanced
our way, curious about the black grief we wore. Sarah sat a short space
apart from us and kept her head tucked low inside her bonnet.
When the two guards lumbered in, I heard Sky’s breath pick up. One
guard patrolled the left side, one the right. They nodded at folks, making
talk here and there. Looking down, I saw the toes of Sky’s slave shoes
sticking out from under her fine dress. The scrabble brown shoes, the
scraped-up sadness of them.
He stopped before us. He said, “Where’re you traveling to?” Talking to
me.
My slave tongue would be like the tip of Sky’s shoes, giving us away. I
lifted my head and looked at him. His guard cap was cocked sideways on
his head. He had new blond whiskers and green eyes. Behind him, through
the smudged window, I saw the water shimmer.
“Mam?” he said.
Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say
something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled
inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was
wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an
answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn’t have to
pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I’d lived and seen and
known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.
A soft wail came from inside me and he took a step back. He said, “I’m
sorry for your loss, mam.”
As he moved on, a white drop fell from my chin, flour plopping on my
skirt.
The engine caught and a shudder ran through the bench. Then came the
smell of oil and spewing smoke. The passengers left the salon for the deck
to wave their hankies farewell, and we went, too, out where the wharf
slaves were tossing the heavy ropes. Far off, the church bells rang on St.
Michael’s.
We stood at the bow, the three of us, holding the rail tight, waiting. The
gulls wheeled by, and the steamer lurched, pitching forward. When the
paddles started to roll, Sarah put her hand on my arm and left it there while
the city heaved away. It was the last square on the quilt.
I thought of mauma then, how her bones would always be here. People
say don’t look back, the past is past, but I would always look back.
I watched Charleston fall away in the morning light.
When we left the mouth of the harbor, the wind swelled and the veils
round us flapped, and I heard the blackbird wings. We rode onto the shining
water, onto the far distance.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 2007, I traveled to New York to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at
the Brooklyn Museum. At the time, I was in the midst of writing a memoir,
Traveling with Pomegranates, with my daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, and I
wasn’t thinking about my next novel. I had no idea what it might be about,
only a vague notion that I wanted to write about two sisters. Who those
sisters were, when and where they lived, and what their story might be had
not yet occurred to me.
The Dinner Party is a monumental piece of art, celebrating women’s
achievements in Western civilization. Chicago’s banquet table with its
succulent place settings honoring 39 female guests of honor rests upon a
porcelain tiled floor inscribed with the names of 999 other women who
have made important contributions to history. It was while reading those
999 names on the Heritage Panels in the Biographic Gallery that I stumbled
upon those of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters from Charleston, South
Carolina, the same city in which I then lived. How could I have not heard of
them?
Leaving the museum that day, I wondered if I’d discovered the sisters I
wanted to write about. Back home in Charleston, as I began to explore their
lives, I became passionately certain.
As it turned out, I’d been driving by the Grimké sisters’ unmarked
house for over a decade, unaware these two women were the first female
abolition agents and among the earliest major American feminist thinkers.
Sarah was the first woman in the United States to write a comprehensive
feminist manifesto, and Angelina was the first woman to speak before a
legislative body. In the late 1830s, they were arguably the most famous, as
well as the most infamous, women in America, yet they seemed only
marginally known, even in the city of their origins. My ignorance of them
felt like both a personal failing and a confirmation of Chicago’s view that
women’s achievements had been repeatedly erased through history.
Sarah and Angelina were born into the power and wealth of
Charleston’s aristocracy, a social class that derived from English concepts
of landed gentry. They were ladies of piety and gentility, who moved in the
elite circles of society, and yet few nineteenth-century women ever
“misbehaved” so thoroughly. They underwent a long, painful
metamorphosis, breaking from their family, their religion, their homeland,
and their traditions, becoming exiles and eventually pariahs in Charleston.
Fifteen years before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
which was wholly influenced by American Slavery As It Is, a pamphlet
written by Sarah, Angelina, and Angelina’s husband, Theodore Weld, and
published in 1839, the Grimké sisters were out crusading not only for the
immediate emancipation of slaves, but for racial equality, an idea that was
radical even among abolitionists. And ten years before the Seneca Falls
Convention, initiated by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the
Grimkés were fighting a bruising battle for women’s rights, taking the first
blows of backlash.
As I read about the sisters, I was drawn more and more to Sarah and
what she’d overcome. Before stepping onto the public stage, she
experienced intense longings for a vocation, crushed hopes, betrayal,
unrequited love, loneliness, self-doubt, ostracism, and suffocating silence. It
seemed to me she had invented her wings not so much in spite of these
things, but because of them. What compelled me as much as her life as a
reformer was her life as a woman. How did she become who she was?
My aim was not to write a thinly fictionalized account of Sarah
Grimké’s history, but a thickly imagined story inspired by her life. During
my research, delving into diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper accounts,
and Sarah’s own writing, as well as a huge amount of biographical material,
I formed my own understanding of her desires, struggles, and motivations.
The voice and inner life I’ve given Sarah are my own interpretation.
I’ve attempted to remain true to the broad historical contours of Sarah’s
life. I’ve included in these pages most of her significant events and
formative experiences, along with an enormous amount of factual detail.
Occasionally I’ve used Sarah’s own words from her writings. Her letters in
the novel, however, are my own invention.
The most expansive and notable way that I’ve diverged from Sarah’s
record is through her imaginary relationship with the fictional character of
Hetty Handful. From the moment I decided to write about Sarah Grimké, I
felt compelled to also create the story of an enslaved character, giving her a
life and a voice that could be entwined with Sarah’s. I felt I couldn’t write
the novel otherwise, that both of their worlds would have to be represented
here. Then I came upon a tantalizing detail. As a girl, Sarah was given a
young slave named Hetty to be her waiting maid. According to Sarah, they
became close. Defying the laws of South Carolina and her own jurist father
who had helped to write those laws, Sarah taught Hetty to read, for which
they were both severely punished. There, however, ends the short narrative
of Hetty. Nothing further is known of her except that she died of an
unspecified disease a short while later. I knew right away that hers was the
other half of the story. I would try to bring Hetty to life again. I would
imagine what might have been.
In addition, I’ve created and extrapolated numerous other events in
Sarah’s life, grafting fiction onto truth in order to serve the story. It’s wellrecorded, for example, that Sarah was a poor public speaker and struggled
to express herself verbally, but there’s no indication she ever had a speech
impediment, as I’ve portrayed. Sarah did return to Charleston in the months
before the Denmark Vesey plot, as I’ve written, most likely trying to escape
her feelings for Israel Morris, and while there, she made her anti-slavery
views public, inciting confrontations, but her volatile encounter on the
street with an officer of the South Carolina militia is all my doing. And
while Sarah knew Lucretia Mott, attending the same Arch Street
Meetinghouse and finding inspiration in Mott’s life as a Quaker minister,
she never boarded in Mott’s house. The same is true of Sarah Mapps
Douglass, who also attended Arch Street Meetinghouse. The two Sarahs
became lasting friends, but Sarah and Angelina did not take refuge in Sarah
Mapps’ attic after Angelina’s incendiary letter was published in The
Liberator. No longer comfortable or welcome in the home of Catherine
Morris, they found a place with friends in Rhode Island and elsewhere. I
fabricated the attic primarily to create a future sanctum for Handful and
Sky. These are just a few of the ways I’ve blended fact and fiction.
Here and there, I’ve taken small liberties with time. The treadmill inside
the Work House upon which I imagined Handful becoming crippled was all
too real, but I’ve predated the treadmill’s installation there by seven years.
The raid on the African church in Charleston that radicalized Denmark
Vesey took place in June 1818, a year earlier than I’ve depicted it. I also
predated the alphabet song, which I described Sarah singing to the children
in Colored Sunday School, where she did in fact teach. And while
Angelina’s letter to the abolitionist newspaper was indeed the fulcrum that
propelled the sisters into the public arena, Sarah did not come to terms with
her sister’s public declaration right away, as I’ve suggested. Sarah was often
slower with her turning points than a novelist would wish. It took her a full
year before finally letting go and throwing herself into the revolutionary
work that would become her great flourishing. I also feel compelled to
mention that Sarah and Angelina were not immediately expelled from their
conservative branch of the Quakers, but Angelina’s letter did create
condemnation, reprimands, and threats of disownment by the committee of
Overseers. The sisters were actually expelled some three years later—
Angelina for marrying a non-Quaker and Sarah for attending the wedding.
The strange and moving symbiosis that began when Sarah became her
sister’s godmother at the age of twelve makes me think they wouldn’t mind
too much that occasionally I’ve borrowed something Angelina said or did
and given it to Sarah. One of the more glaring examples of this has to do
with the anti-slavery pamphlets they wrote appealing to the women and
clergy of the South. Angelina came up with the idea first, not Sarah, and she
wrote her pamphlet a year ahead of Sarah. Nevertheless, once Sarah dived
into composing her own essays, she became the more accomplished
theoretician and writer, while Angelina went on to become one of the most
luminous and persuasive orators of her day. Sarah’s daring feminist
arguments in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, published in 1837, would
inspire and impact women such as Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. Further, it was Angelina’s pamphlets that
were publicly burned by the Charleston postmaster, prompting a warning to
Mrs. Grimké that her daughter should not return to Charleston under threat
of arrest. Let it be said, though, Sarah had no welcome in the city either.
I’ve abridged and consolidated events in the sisters’ public crusade that
took place from December 1836 to May 1838, offering only a telescoped
look at the attacks, censure, hostility, and violence they encountered for
speaking out as they did. They shook, bent, and finally broke the gender
barrier that denied American women a voice and a platform in the political
and social spheres. During the furor, Angelina quipped, “We abolition
women are turning the world upside down.” Sarah’s jibe, which I included
in the novel, was more pointed: “All I ask of our brethren is that they will
take their feet from off our necks.”
As for what became of the sisters after the narrative in the novel ends,
they retired from the rigors of public life following Angelina’s wedding, in
part due to Angelina’s fragile health. Together, they raised Angelina and
Theodore’s three children and remained active in anti-slavery and suffrage
organizations, tirelessly collecting petitions, and giving aid to a number of
Grimké family slaves, whom they helped to set free. Their powerful
document, American Slavery As It Is, sold more copies than any antislavery pamphlet ever written up until Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sarah continued
to write throughout the rest of her life, and I found it moving that she
eventually published her translation of Lamartine’s biography of Joan of
Arc, the female figure of courage whom she so greatly admired. The sisters
started more than one boarding school and taught the children of many
leading abolitionists. While teaching in the school of Raritan Bay Union, a
cooperative, utopian community in New Jersey, they came in contact with
reformers and intellectuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott,
and Henry David Thoreau. I was amused to read that Thoreau found grayhaired Sarah to be a strange sight going about in a feminist bloomer
costume.
My favorite event in Sarah’s later history occurred in 1870, a few years
before she died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, when she and Angelina led a
procession of forty-two women to the polls amid a town election. They
marched through a driving snowstorm, where they dropped their illegal
ballots into a symbolic voting box. It was the sisters’ last act of public
defiance. Sarah lived to be eighty-one. Angelina, seventy-four. Despite
sisterly conflicts from time to time, the unusual bond that tethered them was
never broken, nor were they ever separated.
Besides Sarah and Angelina, I’ve included other historical figures in the
book, rendering them through my own elucidations of their history:
Theodore Weld, the famous abolitionist, whom Angelina married; Lucretia
Mott, another famous abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer; Sarah Mapps
Douglass, a free black abolitionist and educator; Israel Morris, a wealthy
Quaker businessman and widower who proposed marriage to Sarah, twice.
(Her diary suggests she loved him quite deeply, despite turning him down.
She maintained that she was bound to her vocation to become a Quaker
minister, perhaps believing she could not have marriage and independence
both.) There is also Catherine Morris, Israel’s sister and a conservative
Quaker elder, with whom Sarah and Angelina boarded; William Lloyd
Garrison, editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper The Liberator; Elizur
Wright, secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and the poet John
Greenleaf Whittier, Theodore Weld’s friend, who along with Theodore
made a vow not to marry until slavery was ended, a vow Theodore broke. I
might add that both men were supporters of women’s rights, and yet in
letters to Sarah and Angelina, they strongly pressured the sisters to desist
from the cause of women for fear it would split the abolitionist movement.
Some of the more salient words that Angelina wrote back to Theodore are
included in the imagined scene in which the men arrive at Mrs. Whittier’s
cottage and order the sisters to stop their fight for women. Sarah and
Angelina defied the men, and indeed as historian Gerda Lerner pointed out,
they were the ones who attached the cause of women’s rights to the cause of
abolition, creating what some saw as a dangerous split and others as a
brilliant alliance. Either way, their refusal to desist played a vibrant part in
propelling the cause of women into American life.
I’ve tried to represent the members of the Grimké family with a fair
amount of accuracy. Sarah’s mother, Mary Grimké, was by all accounts a
proud and difficult woman. According to Catherine Birney, Sarah’s earliest
biographer, Mrs. Grimké was devout, narrow, undemonstrative in her
affections to her children, and often cruel to her slaves, visiting on them
severe and common punishments. She did not, as far as I know, inflict the
one-legged punishment on her slaves, but it was an actual punishment, one
that Sarah herself described in detail as being used by “one of the first
families in Charleston.” My representation of Sarah’s father, Judge John
Grimké, and of the events in his life, are reasonably close to the record, as
is the account of Sarah’s favorite brother, Thomas. I have no doubt that I
deviated with Sarah’s older sister Mary (“little missus”), whose history is
mostly unknown. Though I found one source that referred to her as
unmarried and others that listed her spouse as unknown, I married her to a
plantation owner and later had her return home as a widow. She did,
however, remain committed to the cause of slavery and unapologetic about
it until her death in 1865, a detail I built upon.
It was a thrill for me to visit the Grimkés’ house on East Bay Street.
Though the house can be dated only to circa 1789, it may have come into
John Grimké’s possession at the time of his marriage in 1784. It remained
in the family until Mrs. Grimké died in 1839. Today, it’s well preserved and
occupied by a law firm. It is likely that some of the house’s original layout
and interiors remain the same, including the fireplaces, cypress panels,
Delft tiles, pine floors, and moldings. Wandering through the house, I could
picture Handful in an alcove on the second floor, gazing out at the harbor,
and Sarah slipping down the staircase to her father’s library as the slaves
lay asleep on the floor outside the bedroom doors. I was even permitted into
the attic, where I noticed a ladder leading to a hatch in the roof. I can’t say
whether the hatch was always there, but I could envision Sarah and Handful
climbing through it as girls, an idea that would prompt the scene of their
having tea on the roof and telling one another their secrets.
The Historic Charleston Foundation was of great help to me and
provided me with a document that contained an inventory and appraisement
of all “the goods and chattels” in John Grimké’s Charleston house soon
after his death in 1819. While poring over this long and meticulous list, I
was stunned to come upon the names, ages, roles, and appraised values of
seventeen slaves. They were recorded between the Brussels carpet and
eleven yards of cotton and flax. The discovery haunted me, and eventually
it found its way into the story with Handful unearthing the inventory in the
library and finding hers and Charlotte’s names inscribed on it along with
their supposed worth.
All of the enslaved characters in the novel are conjured from my
imagination, with the exception of Denmark Vesey’s lieutenants, who were
actual figures: Gullah Jack, Monday Gell, Peter Poyas, and Rolla and Ned
Bennett. All but Gell were hanged for their roles in the plotted revolt. Vesey
himself was a free black carpenter, whose life, plot, arrest, trial, and
execution I’ve tried to represent relatively close to historical accounts. I
didn’t concoct that odd detail about Vesey winning the lottery with ticket
number 1884, then using the payoff to buy both his freedom and a house on
Bull Street. Frankly, I wonder if I would’ve had the courage to make such a
thing up. In public reports, Vesey was said to have been hanged at Blake’s
Lands along with five of his conspirators, but I chose to portray an oral
tradition that has persisted among some black citizens of Charleston since
the 1820s, which states that Vesey was hanged alone from an oak tree in
order to keep his execution shrouded in anonymity. Vesey was said to have
kept a number of “wives” around the city and to have fathered a number of
children with them, so I took the liberty of making Handful’s mother one of
these “wives” and Sky his daughter.
Some historians have doubts about whether Vesey’s planned slave
insurrection truly existed or to what extent, but I have followed the opinion
that not only was Vesey more than capable of creating such a plot, he
attempted it. I wanted this work to acknowledge the many enslaved and free
black Americans who fought, plotted, resisted, and died for the sake of
freedom. Reading about the protest and escapes of various actual female
slaves helped me to shape the characters and stories of Charlotte and
Handful.
The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of
Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African
appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical
legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of
American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. I made a pilgrimage to Washington to see Powers’ quilt, and after
viewing it, it seemed plausible that enslaved women, forbidden to read and
write, could have devised subversive ways to voice themselves, to keep
their memories alive, and to preserve the heritage of their African traditions.
I envisioned Charlotte using cloth and needle as others use paper and pen,
creating a visual memoir, attempting to set down the events of her life in a
single quilt. One of the most fascinating parts of my research had to be the
hours I spent reading about slave quilts and the symbols and imagery in
African textiles, which introduced me to the notion of black triangles
representing blackbird wings.
If you’re inclined to read further about the historical content in the
novel or about Harriet Powers’ quilts, you might want to explore this
sampling of very readable books:
The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and
Abolition, by Gerda Lerner.
The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, by Gerda Lerner.
Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil
Rights Leaders, by Mark Perry.
The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, by Maurie D. McInnis.
Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and
the Man Who Led It, by David Robertson.
Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery, by Charles
Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team.
To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester, with illustrations by Tom Feelings
(Newberry Honor book).
Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers, by Mary Lyons (ALA
Notable Book for Children).
Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts, by Maude
Southwell Wahlman.
In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor
Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “History is not just facts
and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we
are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to . . .
Ann Kidd Taylor, an exceptionally gifted writer and author, who read
and reread this manuscript in progress, offering me invaluable comments
and endless believing.
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, my amazing agent and dear friend.
My terrific editor, Paul Slovak, and Clare Ferraro, and the extraordinary
team at Viking for their boundless support.
Valerie Perry, Aiken-Rhett House museum manager at Historic
Charleston Foundation, who gave so generously of her time and efforts and
offered tremendous help with my research.
Carter Hudgens, director of preservation and education at Drayton Hall
in Charleston, for his time and insights into the life and history of enslaved
people.
The following institutions, which, along with Historic Charleston
Foundation and Drayton Hall, served as resources: the Charleston Museum,
the Charleston Library Society, the College of Charleston’s Addlestone
Library and the Avery Research Center, the Charleston County Public
Library, the South Caroliniana Library, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, the
Nathaniel Russell House Museum, the Charles Pinckney House, the Old
Slave Mart, Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, Lowcountry Africana,
Middleton Place, and Boone Hall Plantation.
Pierce, Herns, Sloan & Wilson, LLC of Charleston, which allowed me
to explore to my heart’s content the historic house that once belonged to the
Grimké family (named the Blake House for its original owner).
Jacqueline Coleburn, rare book cataloger at the Library of Congress in
Washington, D.C., for her enormous assistance in providing me with a
treasure trove of letters, newspapers, Anti-Slavery Convention proceedings,
and other documents related to Sarah and Angelina Grimké and earlynineteenth-century history.
Doris Bowman, associate curator and specialist, Textile Collection at
the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., for
welcoming me into the Smithsonian archives to view Harriet Powers’ Bible
Quilt and for supplying me with a wealth of information about it.
The New-York Historical Society for making available documents
related to the Grimké sisters and Denmark Vesey, including official reports
of Vesey’s insurrection and trial.
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati,
which awed and educated me with its exhibits and interactive experiences
on slavery and abolition.
Marilee Birchfield, librarian at the University of South Carolina, for aid
with research questions.
Robert Kidd and Kellie Bayuzick Kidd for being willing and able
research assistants.
Scott Taylor for providing patient and expert technical help, especially
the week my computer crashed.
There were many primary sources, books, essays, and articles about the
Grimkés, Denmark Vesey, slavery, abolition, quilts and African textiles, and
early-nineteenth-century history that became the bedrock of my research,
but I would like to especially mention my indebtedness to Dr. Gerda Lerner,
whose scholarship and writings about the Grimké sisters greatly influenced
me, particularly her biography The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina:
Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition. I’m also indebted to the
research and writing of Mark Perry in his book Lift Up Thy Voice: The
Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders; H.
Catherine Birney in The Grimké Sisters; David Robertson in Denmark
Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man
Who Led It; and Maurie D. McInnis in The Politics of Taste in Antebellum
Charleston. I want to acknowledge an American black folktale, from which
I drew inspiration, about people in Africa being able to fly and then losing
their wings when captured into slavery. The story is beautifully told by
Virginia Hamilton and magnificently illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon in
the ALA Notable Children’s Book The People Could Fly: American Black
Folktales.
I’m immensely grateful to the wonderful group of friends who listened
to me recount the pull, challenges, and joys of writing this novel, and who
never ceased to encourage me: Terry Helwig, Trisha Sinnott, Curly Clark,
Carolyn Rivers, Susan Hull Walker, and Molly Lehman. I’m grateful, too,
for Jim and Mandy Helwig, who along with Terry have long been part of
my extended family.
I was sustained every single day by the love and support of family: my
parents Leah and Ridley Monk; my son Bob Kidd and his wife, Kellie; my
daughter Ann Kidd Taylor and her husband, Scott; my grandchildren Roxie,
Ben, and Max; and my husband, Sandy, who has journeyed with me since
college and whose bravery during the past year both inspired and deepened
me. No words can ever express my gratitude for each of them.
